Bro-tel Hell
by Emily Baudelaire
Summary: While on their way to visit Robin's dad, Barney and Robin are stormed in at a seedy roadside motel with a dark secret- it's the place they'll encounter (and fight) their first zombies. Can be read as a prequel to The Walking Ted, or can be a standalone fic, but homages and story content of The Walking Ted is heavily hinted at in this story. T for lots of gore.


The windshield wipers aggressively swept across the window of Barney's rental car, attempting to clear it of the rapidly and heavily falling rain.

"The hurricane warning is still on," Robin told him.

"Hurricane schmuricane!" Barney scoffed. "Ha! Poppycock! We can make it there in time, and you know it!"

"Usually I'd agree with you, but the weather does seem to be getting worse," Robin stated. "Then again, back in Canada, this would have been the perfect day for a swim. Too bad the weather'll be so different there…"

Barney ignored her. "No worries, Robin, you're driving with the master. Name one time I haven't gotten you somewhere you needed to be before, weather out of the question."

"Um, well, there was that time we were almost late for Ted's New Year's party," Robin said. "Then there was that St. Patrick's Day parade, and Ted's birthday party that one year. A strange amount of parties have played the part in those times. And Ted."

"But this is different," Barney insisted. "I mean, Ted's not involved, and…damnit Robin, why are we even doing this?"

Robin shrugged. "No clue. If we would have stayed back at the apartment, there's a small chance we wouldn't have died."

"Right! And at least if we would have, there's a less likely chance that I'd get my limbs torn apart and fed to bears. I mean the death would have inevitably have been less painful."

"Barney, come on, my dad won't kill you," Robin told him. "I mean, we will be there a while, but he probably won't kill you. But still, this weekend is going to be horribly long."

"Excruciatingly long," Barney added, sneering a little and gripping the wheel so tightly his hands turned red. "But at least we'll have each other, right?"

"Yeah," she sighed. "At least. Hypothetically though, if this storm is as bad as they say it will be and there's an all-out apocalypse and you die first, you would be okay with me using your body in creative ways to help myself survive, right?"

Barney thought for a minute. "Eh, make sure that certain parts get recycled right, and keep my brain for preservation. I wouldn't want all of that genius to be wasted."

"Ah, got it."

The rain was coming down so heavily now that the windshield wipers could work no longer to perform their duties, and the wind was downright aggressive.

"You think maybe we should pull over at the next stop?" Barney asked, his voice wavering with a hint of fear that he was trying desperately to conceal.

"No way!" Robin answered. "We've only got a few more miles to go, why would you want to stop now?"

Barney gulped, his Adam's apple quivering slightly in his throat out of nervousness. "Uh…yeaaah, right! We'll keep going then!" He would never have admitted it, but bad weather made him terribly skittish. Thunderstorms had been one of his many childhood phobias, for reasons he could never place his finger on. And driving right through the heart of a huge storm system made him wildly uncomfortable. Yet he kept on driving, heeding Robin's words and hoping desperately that they would indeed arrive at their destination in a few miles.

The storm, however, had other plans, and the sky had turned a dark shade of near black, not just because night was creeping up, but because of the enormous hurricane on its way, its pre-storms in full up on his right, he could just make out the blurred shape of a building from his window, only obscured by the smudges of raindrops, what looked to be a motel of sorts. Robin had dozed off next to him, so without her insisting, he took the next turn and wheeled into the parking lot.

Rain was pelting down harder than before, like shards of glass, each drop so large that the impact of their falling could be physically felt. He tapped his sleeping wife on the shoulder gently.

"Hmm?" she asked sleepily. "Barney, where are we?"He quickly licked his lips.

"I had to pull over, Robin, okay?"

"Barney," she whined, rubbing one eye. "You could have kept going…"

"But I'm tired," he insisted, and that was a half truth. "Come on, we're gonna go in to this…really seedy, unnerving looking murdery place." He opened the door and popped open the trunk, grabbing his luggage while Robin got hers.

They rushed in as fast as they could, seeking shelter from the rapidly falling rain. Indoors, the motel had a strangely unsettling feeling about it. The paint, once pink, was peeling in spots all over, exposing paneling in the walls, accompanied by the blood red carpeting spread across the floor, and taxidermy creatures of all colors, sizes, and types were strewn about, their heads decorating the place, and were mounted nearly everywhere elsewhere. An eerie, flickering "no soliciting" sign was hung at the door. There was one singular old lady working at the front desk, a black cat sat on the top of it that was certainly real, but alive or not was another question.

"Wonder how many hookers are takin' up residence at this place?" Barney asked to no one in particular with a vague sense of wonder in his voice.

"Barney, I don't like this," Robin said quietly. "We should get back on the road."

"Robin, relax! Everything's fine." He went up to talk to the old lady at the desk. "Hi, my wife and I are looking for a place to stay the night," he said. "How much are your nightly fees?"

"Ten bucks," the old lady, who suffered from a noticeable lazy eye, said.

"Wait, ten bucks?" Barney had to repeat it to himself- that was awfully cheap. "Wow, nice!" Smiling, he pulled two fives out of his pockets and eagerly handed them over, while the lady gave him a key.

"Room 666, down the hall," she told him. "Don't get lost. The last little girl who did that wasn't lucky. If you see her…tell her to stop haunting the place."

Barney cocked his head. "Wait…there's a ghost here?"

The old lady was quiet for a few seconds. "No."

Barney and Robin, ignoring that strangeness, headed on down the dimly lit hall to their room. "Room 666," Barney remarked. "Who knows what darkness lies in wait here! Mwahahaha!" He clicked the key into the keyhole and turned, the door creaking loudly when it opened. The sound of hundreds of little scuttling feet could be heard, causing him to jump. Years ago, Ted had told him of his stay at the Arcadian, before it had been demolished, and he and Zoey's unlucky encounter with the fabled Cockamouse, but Barney was sure that the Arcadian would have paled in comparison to this place. Barney put their bags down in the corner of the room, then noticed the carpet, which was stained with something an unsettling brownish red color.

"Oh…um…looks like somebody spilled their Kool Aid!" he remarked.

"That's blood," Robin pointed out.

Barney looked around the room and clicked his tongue. "Man, this place is like what would happen if every single cliche horror movie hotel ever had a baby together."

"Yes, that would be reason number 989 why we should have kept driving," Robin said as she placed her hands on her hips. "You feel comfortable sleeping in this nasty hellhole of a room? Because I don't."

"Well, I would be lying if I said I haven't been in worse," Barney breathed out. "This one time, I met up with this super hot blonde, and she told me that she had a mansion out on Long Island with a beach view, but as it turned out, she really lived in a rotting, run-down cellar with five cats and a ton of teddy bears. We still did it anyway, so everything was fine."

Sighing, Robin sat down on the large bed, which creaked and groaned. "Barney, if we end up dying in here, I swear to God that I'll never let you live it down. In the afterlife."

"Relax! Robin, we'll be fine, I'm telling you, nothing is going to happen!" At that moment, a bloodcurdling shriek coming from next door pierced the air. Barney cocked his head and raised an eyebrow, but acted less shocked than expected in such a circumstance.

"You wanna take back that 'nothing is going to happen' thing you just said?" Robin challenged.

"Yeah, actually," Barney agreed. They both got up at the same time, and Robin peeked through the rather sufficiently sized hole in the wall, a thin beam of light protruding from it.

"Can you see anything?" Barney whispered.

Robin squinted. "I think so…NO WAY!"

"What is it?"

"They have a Canadian flag in their room!"

Barney rolled his eyes. "Anything else? That's maybe actually important?"

"Uh, let me look…whoa, whoa whoa, holy crap!"

"Lemme guess, it's something else relating to Canada?"

"No." She looked closer, then whispered to Barney, "there's a dead woman in there."

Barney's mouth dropped. "Whaaaaaat?!"

"And…" Robin continued. "Uh, she looks strangely familiar…"

"Let me see!" Barney peered in and gasped audibly. "Oh my God she does!" He turned back to Robin, who was crouched down. "Who…?"

She shrugged. "I don't know!"

Barney looked again. "Wait a second. Krirsten! That's Krirsten! Remember her? Other half of that horrible couple that tried to sabotage our date a few years back?"

"I knew it! What is she doing here? I mean, she's dead, but what was she doing here?"

Barney shot her an odd look.

"RIP, but still," Robin said with a tilt of her head. "And if she's here, then that means so is that horrible husband of hers…" She looked once again. Correctly enough, her husband, or what had been her husband, was indeed in the neighboring room, but something wasn't normal about him. He has morphed into some kind of gruesome monster, seemingly. A zombie. He has become a zombie! Robin could only watch in absolute horror as the mangled creature started his feast, as zombies do, seeking her brain.

"Hey, um, Barney?"

"Yeah?"

"You don't…believe in zombies, do you?"

"Of course not, why?"

She beckoned for him to look, and he did. He was about to scream, but Robin quickly clamped her hand over his mouth, hushing him. "Don't let it know we're here!" she hissed at him.

"Robin, zombies aren't real, what kind of sick joke is this?" Barney said tearily. "I wanna go home!" Another boom of thunder rumbled just then, so loudly that it shook the light fixtures dangling from the ceiling.

"See, I told you this would happen!" Robin said to him. "This is Hotel Hell! Bates Motel! Every hellish hotel or motel or whatever-tel imaginable!"

Though he was shaken, Barney still managed to squeak out a mere, "Brotel Hell!"

"We gotta come up with a plan to get outta here," Robin said as she placed a hand over her forehead, pacing around the room. Barney was still peering through the hole. It was an undeniable fact that he had always had a penchant for the disturbing, and even though this was reality, it was no different. He was a fan of all sorts of horror movies, and had been his whole life, though he would never admit that he was kept awake many nights by what he had watched. So it was with a fatal intrigue that he spectated as the gory scene unfolded next door.

Then…the zombie looked at him. It looked straight at him with its red, rheumy eyes, its face bloodied. It had spotted prey. He gasped. "It saw us. Robin, it saw us!"

"Oh my God!"

"What do we do now?"

There wasn't a second to react before the creature began hacking through the thin walls. The two screamed simultaneously, and Robin, thinking quickly, grabbed the handgun from her suitcase.

"Why do you have that with you?!" Barney cried.

"For situations like this!" she replied. It was too late. The creature was ready to attack and had sunk its decaying hands into her shoulders, about to bite into her neck. She tried desperately to fight it off, but Barney stepped in. He immediately grabbed a decorative martial arts sword conveniently located in the corner of the room, unsheathed it, and plunged it into the zombie's rotting body. With a bellow, it fell to the floor, staining the already red carpet even redder.

Robin was panting heavily, and Barney was standing aside, still clutching the sword tightly in his hands, trying to rationalize what had just happened. They both turned to each other, shock in their eyes.

"So…uh, now what?" Barney asked. "Should we tell the front desk lady with the creepy lazy eye, or just wing it?"

"Well, I think we're fully capable of getting rid of the body ourselves, if that's what you're thinking," Robin breathed out.

"Man," Barney commented, shifting his jaw. "They're terrible both alive and in the afterlife."

She nodded in agreement.

"Alright, first thing's first," Robin said, kneeling down. "We gotta bury the body and make sure he doesn't come back, understood?"

Barney nodded. "Gotcha!"

"And we're gonna plan it out together, deal?"

"Right! Okay, here's the plan. Step 1: There's a door just down the hallway. Get the body into a bag (or something of the sort, maybe a blanket?), and get it out there. Step 2: Dig an enormous hole. Step 3: Put the body in the hole. Step 4: Pack it in. Step 5: Take a much needed break."

"All but number five," Robin agreed. "Real bodysnatchers don't need breaks. Even though we're kind of the opposite of that, come to think of it."

"Nah, number five is the most important."

"Whatever, but we gotta do this! We don't want this guy coming back."

"Alright!" Barney rubbed his hands together.

Robin quickly yanked the bedsheets off of the bed, flattening them out across the floor. "Get ready to wrap this guy like a burrito," she said. "Now let's pick him up." He grabbed the zombie's arms, while Robin got the legs. "On two, we lift," she told him. "One…two!"

Though straining, they succeeded in lifting the body, just enough that they could place it on the blanket. Barney let out a puff of air.

"You weak, Stinson?" Robin asked. "Come on, show your strength! Up and at 'em!"

He rolled the blanket over the body. "Why can't you lift it this time?" He whined.

"Stop being a girl!" Robin retorted. In survival mode, it was quite common of her to get a little snappy and quite intimidating, but Barney expected that. "You've got balls, show 'em!"

He cocked his head. "Wait, now? I mean I'm all for it, but-"

"Not literally! Just grab this oaf, okay?"

He did, in the same way as before, and they worked in carrying the body out. Or rather dragging it out. Because it was still relatively fresh and hadn't been given much time at all to decay, it was too heavy for them to carry, so they let it fall to the floor, Robin grabbing its legs and pulling, and Barney sort of just wandering behind her. He screamed girlishly when the head rolled off due to the friction of being dragged, but Robin quickly hushed him. Whether or not anyone was in the place at all was still a subject of questioning, but even if so, no one noticed the two carrying out their grisly deed. They walked down the hallway, checking to ensure that nobody was watching them as they did, until they found the back door, which Robin kicked open. The air was cool, but the rain was still pelting down heavily, and a violent wind still blowing.

"We gotta find something to dig with," Robin told Barney once she had placed the zombie's body down on the wet, squishy silt. Barney looked around, which was hard to do in the darkness. Conveniently, there was a shovel, resting against a birdbath. Unbelievable. First the sword, and now the shovel. It was almost as if someone had been very prepared for this to happen.

"I found a shovel!" he notified her loudly.

"Then let's start digging, come on!" She grabbed the shovel and plunged it into the moist, squishy mud, tossing aside large wet chunks of earth, while he watched to make sure that no one could see them. When the hole had been dug deep enough, long enough, and wide enough, in perfect measurements to fit a corpse, she pushed it in, then proceeded to cover it with mounds of wet mud, finally patting it down with the shovel. "There," she panted out. "We did it." She held the shovel slung over her back, as you would a large gun.

"So…now what?" Barney asked. "Back inside?" An unearthly crack of thunder and lightning shook the ground, causing him to jump.

"Back inside," Robin told him.

* * *

Robin paced around the room as Barney dried himself off from the rain, his hair matted down but sticking up in places, a towel wrapped over his shoulders. Outside, the storm was still raging, and the sound of the pouring rain could be heard pelting against the thin roof.

"If we tell the weird front desk lady, there's no way she's gonna believe us!" he insisted. "Also, I usually don't care about this stuff, but is it really safe to drive out there right now?"

"Then what do you suggest?" she asked. "We stay the night here? With zombies on the loose?"

"And a ghost," Barney added with a shudder. "I don't know. I guess…we could just prepare ourselves for the worst and hope for the best."

Robin sat down next to him, her weight causing the bed to sink and creak even more. "Then here's the plan- we bunk down for the night with weapons."

Barney's eyebrow raised. "Are you suggesting what I think you're suggesting?"

"We're getting out of here alive," she told him, getting up and grabbing the sword once again, unsheathing it from its casing. "And we're going to fight together."

"Yes!" Barney agreed excitedly. "We're gonna tear apart those nasty demons bit by bit and make them wish they'd never have come back from the dead!" the two exclaimed in unison.

They turned to each other. "Awww!"

"The thought of you fighting those creatures is so hot," Barney purred out lustily, leaning in to kiss her neck, but she gently shoved him off.

"Not yet," she said. "We fight first." She winked at him, only adding to her sexiness.

"Ugh, I can't wait til the fighting is over then," he muttered, looking downward, his face practically pressed to hers, breath hot against her lips. "All that blood and gore…it'll look so hot on you…"

She smiled slyly. "You know if anyone could hear us right now, we'd sound completely insane, right?"

"Insanely awesome!" he retorted. "Stick with me, Machete Scherbatsky. Promise?"

"As long as you do, Barnblazer."

* * *

They didn't sleep for over half the night, but rather stayed awake with each other, planning how they would fight and what weapons they could acquire and use. Eventually, at around 3 AM, they collapsed on the bed together, snoring, dozing soundly.

Two hours passed, and the storm was finally slowing to a halt outside. Then…

Thump.

Chik.

Ssh-ssh.

Barney stirred in his sleep, then mumbled something incoherent and smushed his face into the pillow. Robin turned over, still snoring.

Thump.

Boom.

An inhuman hand was thumping at the window, pounding uncoordinatedly. First one, then two. Then two more. The first one scratched and clawed at the glass, leaving smudgy trails of blood down the panes. Another hand, of a different zombie, suddenly punched at the window, shattering it into hundreds of tiny shards. The sound awoke Robin, and she screamed at the sight of another hideous undead monster crawling through the now open window. Her scream alerted Barney that something was wrong, and after he awakened and saw the thing, he screamed as well.

Robin flipped off the bed just before the zombie attempted to attack her, grabbed her sword, and thrust it into its rotting body, just under the heart, then withdrew the weapon and plunged it back in, this time to its head, which knocked it out for good. At the same time, Barney took on the other one, mainly with his own bare hands. He grabbed the head of it and pulled, kicked, and punched violently at its body while he had it in his grip, before taking a final move to it and punching his fist into its chest, ripping out its heart, which he then violently threw.

The carnage ended abruptly, Barney's bloody fists clenched as he panted, snarling like a dog. He snapped his neck into place, staring at the mess of blood and guts on the floor before him. He then turned to Robin. "Zombie killing high-five?"

"Hell yeah!"

Their hands met with a wet slapping sound.

* * *

The two had showered together not long after their murderous escapade, washing off the blood and flecks of gore before making love in the warm, steamy atmosphere. They left the motel shortly after doing so.

* * *

Outside that morning, a hazy yellow sun was shining through thick white clouds, the air still sticky with the previous night's precipitation, yet overall cool.

"Wonder what room service is going to think of that," Barney remarked with a smirk as he closed the car door behind him, buckling himself in.

"Hopefully not that we're serial killers," Robin responded, glossing her lips in the front mirror.

"Hey, one thing real quick," she said as Barney pulled out of the parking lot. "I never really believed in zombies before, but since all that has obviously proven me dead wrong- no pun intended- you don't think that we're on the verge of a zombie apocalypse, do you?"

"Why, do you?" Barney asked.

"Psh, no, of course not!" Robin scoffed. A few seconds later, she added, "but it's just…I don't know, it kind of feels like everything is falling together in a way that that could maybe happen?"

"Then what's your plan if it does?"

"What do you suggest?"

Barney thought for a little while. "That we don't tell the others back home?"

"That if anything does happen, we lie and pretend that we never saw it coming?"

"That if they start suspecting anything at all, we act super casual and like it's probably treatable and will go away if everyone just ignores it?"

"Bingo."

Barney smirked slyly. "I mean, we're clearly getting ahead of ourselves here. Obviously we're not on the verge of a zombie apocalypse."

"Yeah, right, obviously not. Just a weird little thing back there. There aren't anymore of those guys anyway."

"Nope, those were the only ones, and we killed 'em!" Barney agreed. He changed the subject after a few minutes of silence. "So, you wanna stop somewhere to eat?"

"God, yes, please. There's a Tim Horton's miles away from here."

"Ugh, why Tim Horton's?" Barney groaned.

"Um, because why not Tim Horton's?"

"I guess I could go for some donuts…hmm, fine. Lead the way, Scherbatsky."

* * *

Just miles behind them, something was stirring. A veiny, rotting arm reached from the ground, clawing at the grass, before slowly unearthing its whole body. Then, it lunged.

**THE END (…Or is it?)**


End file.
